Museflashes

Published on August 17, 2007

Mead Art Museum names new director

Amherst College's Mead Art Museum has a new director and chief curator with a range of experience at several major museums. Elizabeth Barker, who assumed the position in mid-July, had previously worked as the former director of the Picker Art Gallery at Colgate University in Hamilton, N.Y. and the associate curator of drawings and prints at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

Barker also has served as a fellow in the department of prints and drawings at the British Museum in London, and as a guest curator at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Conn. She holds a bachelor's degree in art history from Yale, as well as graduate degrees in art history from New York University's Institute of Fine Arts, where she also earned her certificate in curatorial studies.

Speaking by phone from Maine, where she was vacationing, Barker was full of enthusiasm for her new position. "I'm just really excited to be coming to Amherst College," she explained. "The students I met there were wonderful, filled with good ideas and really bright, and I liked everyone I met of the college faculty and the colleagues that I'll have at other nearby museums. I think the location will be wonderful."

Barker will oversee museum acquisitions, exhibitions and programs, and the care of the Mead's collections, as well as the management of the museum's seven staff members. Her appointment is the result of an intensive national search conducted by the college last year after the resignation of former director Jill Meredith.

"One of the things I'm really interested in doing at the Mead is working personally with the student docents and making sure we're taking advantage of all their creative energy," said Barker. She said she especially wants to engage with the student community, not only of Amherst but at all area colleges. "We're really eager to become a place that students think of as home - it's their museum."

Barker's plans include getting more of the museum's collection online. "We want to make it convenient for students to find out what we have and what it looks like, and then come and see as much of it as they like."

The Mead was established in 1855 and is home to more than 16,000 works. The museum's collection of American art is one of the most diverse collections in an academic institution, and the Mead is also home to one of the major collections of ukiyo-e - a type of Japanese woodblock printing - in the country. Although Barker's specialties are in 18th- and 19th-century British and 19th- and 20th-century American art - particular strengths of the Mead - she is looking forward to working with a diverse body of art.

"I find that a lot of the ideas that are used in one discipline can be used in another," she explained. "For example, bringing some of the questions that are current in thinking about contemporary art to bear on a piece of ancient art can yield some really interesting results.

"The Mead has a great collection and I think it will be exciting to think about ways in which we can use that collection to tell stories that haven't been told before," she added. "This museum can really be a site for creative exploration."

- DANA GLASS

Old Deerfield acquires architectural pieces

Historic Deerfield has recently acquired some items from the Coleman-Hollister House of Greenfield, items that officials consider important in the history of American architecture.

They include the east and west main entrance doors, fanlights and sidelights, as well as the sash and sidelights that graced the facade's Palladian window sash.

The building is now the McCarthy Funeral Home on Bank Row.

It was designed in 1796 by the famous American architect, Asher Benjamin (1773-1845), who published this country's first architectural pattern book, "The Country Builder's Assistant," in Greenfield in 1797.

The sash and doors join the museum's existing architectural fragments collection, which already includes several other pieces from the Benjamin-designed Leavitt-Hovey House (which now houses Greenfield Public Library), also in Greenfield. The collection is available to the public by appointment only.

"These items are an integral part of one of the most important neo-classical houses in America," said Philip Zea, president of Historic Deerfield. "We acquired these items to keep them in Franklin County after they were removed and offered for sale by a salvage company."

Asher Benjamin is best known for widely influencing early 19th-century American architectural design through his popular pattern books, which were used by architects and builders throughout the new Republic.

He is credited with designing a number of buildings in and around Greenfield, including the original Deerfield Academy (now Memorial Hall Museum) in Deerfield.

"The importance of the Coleman-Hollister house to Franklin County, and indeed all of Western Massachusetts, is incalculable," said Abbott Lowell Cummings, architectural historian and former director of the Society for Preservation of New England Antiquities (now Historic New England).

Considered the best surviving example of Benjamin's early work, the house was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1989.

It incorporates high-quality neoclassical detailing considered cutting edge at the time of its creation, and which was soon imitated on numerous houses around the country, a process made possible by Benjamin's book, which was widely distributed.

"Most of the pieces are in remarkably good condition," said William Flynt, architectural conservator at Historic Deerfield.

Historic Deerfield offers tours.

For more information, call 775-7214 or see: www.historic-deerfield.org.

Westward Ho summer for Amherst playwright

For her "What I Did on My Summer Vacation" essay, Constance Congdon, playwright-in-residence at Amherst College, may need a few extra pages. In June her play "So Far: The Children of Elvi" had its Northwest premiere at Key City Players in Port Townsend, Wash., and her new adaptation of Moliere's "The Imaginary Invalid," commissioned by American Conservatory Theatre, opened at The Geary Theatre in San Francisco. Her adaptation of Goldoni's "The Servant of Two Masters," originally commissioned by the Hartford Stage Company, opened at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival in July.

Congdon, who received her M.F.A. in playwriting from the University of Massachusetts, is an alumna of New Dramatists and a member of PEN. She has taught at Amherst College since 1993.

Gravestone carving on tap at History Museum

The Amherst History Museum presents a program on early American gravestone imagery with a stone carving demonstration and discussion Saturday morning at 10 a.m. in the Strong House garden at 67 Amity St.

Local carver Sarah Madison will demonstrate stone carving and give participants an opportunity to try their hands. She'll also speak about the symbolism used on Colonial gravestones and the evolution of gravestone imagery from the 1600s to the 1830s.

Weather-permitting, the morning will include a visit to the West Cemetery in downtown Amherst with Bob Drinkwater, past president of the Association of Gravestone Studies. The museum's exhibit "Emily Dickinson's Amherst" will also be open for free viewing with the program fee of $8 or $5 for museum members. For more information, call the museum at 256-0678.

Calling all bratistes' for the Show Us Your Bra' biennial benefit auction

It's time again to have a little fun with undergarments for a good cause. The Breast Form Fund seeks artists or "bratistes" to construct cleverly named bras for its biennial fundraising auction "Show Us Your Bra!"

The Breast Form Fund is a non-profit organization that provides post-mastectomy prostheses and bras to uninsured and underinsured survivors of breast cancer in Massachusetts.

Bratistes are invited to name, design, and build or embellish up to two bras to be auctioned off at the SUYB party Oct. 13 from 7 to 10 p.m. at the Northampton Center for the Arts. The bras should be life-sized or miniature, three-dimensional and made from non-perishable materials.

There is an entry fee of $10 for one bra and $15 for two. Entries will be judged by a panel of art professionals and prizes awarded to top entries in miniature and life-size categories. Creations may be submitted at NCA at 17 New South St. from Friday, Sept. 21 through Sunday, Sept. 23 at 2 p.m.

For entry forms, contest details and other information visit the Web site at showusyourbra.org, or call 584-6673.

Exhibit of paper art opens at arts co-op

Amherst artist Jane Chang joins paper cutter Edith Bingham of Shelburne Falls in an exhibit at the Shelburne Arts Co-operative showcasing works created of paper. "Two Artists Working With Paper" opens with a reception Aug. 24, from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. at the co-op at 26 Bridge St. in Shelburne.

Bingham's intricate paper-cut works express themes from folklore, scenes from rural life, children, animals, gardening, historic and political subjects. Also found in her work are reflections of the local arts and customs drawn from her extensive travels in Europe, Asia and the Middle East. Her paper cuts were also featured in "The Civil War," a two-volume book by Harold Holzer, published by Cobblestone Press in 1998.

Chang is showing paper quilts, decorative boxes and mixed-media collage. "All my life I have been drawn to decorative boxes," she said.

"When I see one I must touch it, study it and imagine its purpose. Then I am compelled to open it."

Chang's covers her boxes with handmade and specialty papers, and fills them with found treasures. She uses leftover scraps to create paper quilts reminiscent of traditional fabric quilts, and to create mixed-media collages.

Chang contributed an Emily Dickinson-inspired chair featuring her collage technique to the Greenfield Public Library's Illustrated Chair Auction last year. The Emily Dickinson International Society made the winning bid, and the chair was presented to society president, Gudrun Grabner, head of the American studies department at the University of Innsbruck, Austria.

For more information, call (413) 625-9324.